Help us shape Wikimedia’s prototype visual editor

Today, the Wikimedia Foundation launched a new prototype “visual editor” for Wikimedia. The visual editor is a new editing environment that won’t require everyone to learn our special markup language in order to contribute to our projects.

We identified the difficulty in learning wikitext as a key inhibitor to growing our editor community in the Wikimedia movement’s strategic plan. We want the process of learning how to edit to be trivial, so our volunteers, both new and experienced, can devote themselves to what they edit. That’s why we’re building the visual editor, so that contributing to a wiki is as easy and natural as other modern editing systems, and new editors are not dissuaded from making their changes.

You may remember a similar announcement in December 2011, when we revealed a developer prototype of our “visual editor,” but after a great deal of feedback, we’ve reworked it so that it’s more useful to our community of users.

We learned a lot from building our first prototype. It was great how many of you helped with feedback, bug reports and comments about how we were doing. In the months since then, based on your feedback and technical issues we encountered, we’ve overhauled the entire editor. We changed the technical design and how it works, rewriting its components so that we can better support more editors. We’ve also integrated it into the MediaWiki platform, so now it can load and edit wiki articles, and not just sit separately.

A screenshot of the new visual editor

To build this iteration of our open-source visual editor, we have been working with some of the team from Wikia, a collaborative publisher that operates the largest network of video game, entertainment and lifestyle wikis in the world. We both believe that this kind of tool should be built not just for the Wikimedia wiki projects, but for everyone using MediaWiki software, and when it’s done we look forward to including the visual editor “out of the box” for anyone setting up a wiki with our software.

Thanks to all this, our new prototype is now live on mediawiki.org. This is just a demonstration, and very far from a finished product — for example, we haven’t yet added image or table handling. It’s currently locked down to only work on a self-contained area of the wiki, so that it doesn’t encounter any unsupported content or break anything else. We intend to work on small pieces of the overall story, releasing a new version every two weeks or so, and adding features one-by-one until the editor is good enough to deploy for everyone (and release in MediaWiki’s core).

Over the next few weeks and months, we will be working with the community — you — to find bugs, to focus on what our priorities should be, and most importantly, to make sure that what we’re building is right for you and that it supports your “workflow.”

24 Comments on Help us shape Wikimedia’s prototype visual editor

It’s going to be tough to fight the continually rising tide of government snooping especially as the man in the street believes such matters beyond his understanding, and thus tends to defer to the rulers and their “experts”.

FINALLY! This one is really overdue; when I looked into Wikipedia ~3yrs ago to contribute, it was such a hazzle to do that I decided not to do.
-I want to concentrate on content, not blow my time with yet another markup language.

I think this is wonderful and needs to be implemented as soon as possible. I believe it will really help the project, which as others have pointed out, is in danger of slowly dying if we are not careful.

I think there are a significant number of smart academics and the like who have no interest in learning wikitext. They type up journal articles just fine in MS Word. Wiki has been too long run by programmer types. What matters is CONTENT. The back office stuff should all be taken care of and be flawless, so the “content is king” writers are encouraged. As it is now, the place is starting to die…

Visual editor is an important step forward. WAY, WAY, WAY overdue. Especially given how easy we rake in donations and how much we are banking for rainy days (and wasting on India projects).

Now, could we PLEASE start showing videos in a format that IE users can read? That is just insane to have this open source antipathy to normal format (make the ogg file a require alternative…but at least ALLOW normal browsing by “civilians”.)

I’ve “inherited” a small Wikimedia installation, pretty much no one edits it because of the need to learn wiki markup. Instead, there are a bunch of Word documents that they uploaded and linked from the main page.

When it first came out, I think the idea of basic wiki markup was pretty cool, a way to split the difference between the power of html and plain text, but things have kept moving. Web based HTML visual editors are a lot better supported and more powerful and lots of people want to use something “simple”. Plus, the various different wiki markup languages make it a pain… which one does one pick (for their own site). All of this leads me to think the visual editor will be great for people using wikimedia installations elsewhere.

Simply love this stuff!! Good work Visual Editor Team ;-)
Awaiting when it becomes live on Wikipedia and the whole editing scenario changes..this would be really useful to new editors and experienced editors can edit faster with this. Furthermore, Wikipedia will lose to them who complained ever saying “It is too complicated to edit articles on Wikipedia”.

Have said it before and I will say it again: syntax highlighting would solve part of the problem. This one color character mix can be hard to edit even for powerusers. And not because they don’t understand but because it’s hard to see where one element ends and another starts.

Looks cool. For UX, I suggest that you involve non-Wikimedians at each step of development to test how it comes off to people not used to editing – who are the main audience for this potentially great new tool. Many thanks!

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The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Is a nonprofit charitable organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge.

The Wikimedia projects have an international scope, and the Wikimedia movement has already made a significant impact throughout the world. To continue this success on an organizational level, Wikimedia is building an international network of associated organizations.